"What we'd hit
was not, in fact, a genuine mule deer, but a man dressed in a deer costume.
He wore a flannel shirt and khaki's under his disguise, and introduced
himself..."

Last month, I decided
to write fiction on this page of The Digital Journalist. I made-up two
characters, myself, and another myself. I put them in a setting familiar
to me: a news crew car in New Mexico. Then I needed a plot. I figured
I should include a UFO encounter, since I couldn't think of anything
else. Okay. And since I've been obsessed for three months with a story
I call "Mad Elk," I thought I'd have the car hit a large game animal.
I heard a similar plot on a radio skit, in which a snowmobile hit a
moose, and I liked it enough to borrow it.

It seemed a little
thin, though. It just didn't, um, resonate...

With
my column deadline approaching, I did a Live Shot for Good Morning America
at KOAT in Albuquerque. After buying breakfast burritos for the crew
and some of the newsroom staff, I solicited ideas for my story. I ran
down my outline to soundman Darryl Frank: A TV crew hits a deer, and
then a UFO lands. "No," he said, "it should be a person in a deer suit,
not a deer." He had seen this in a comedy routine somewhere, with an
undercover game warden inside the deer suit.

It was all I had,
so I wrote it up, creating a short story that solicited comments like,
"Very funny" and "Did you have a recent head injury?"

Before the laughter
faded, I noticed an article in The New York Times on the Web. It seems
that Joel Berger, a wildlife biologist at the University of Nevada at
Reno, wears a moose costume while conducting his research in Yellowstone
National Park. Berger wears the costume while mingling with moose to
record their response to predators like gray wolves and grizzlies that
are being re-introduced to the wild, after near-extinction.

I know life-imitates-art
and all that, but the idea that another guy in an antler suit would
show up on the Web doing something I could never have dreamed up all
by myself, was enough to send me to the search engine for the fellow
in the moose suit.

The next day, I
talked on the phone with Joel Berger. He explained that moose in Wyoming
have been isolated from grizzly bears and wolves for nearly a century,
and they don't display the vigilance they will need when the predators
are re-introduced to the habitat. He studies the animals' behavior by
placing a pile of what bears are known for doing in the woods, very
near the moose. The first "bearshit" delivery system he tried was the
slingshot method, which behaved like the proverbial fan.

Joel Berger decided
he needed to "look like a moose," and asked a costume designer from
the original Star Wars movie to make a moose suit. The price tag for
such outerwear runs from $2,000 for the deluxe model, down to a mere
$250 for the one Joel ordered. Joel does his "planet-of-the-moose" amblings
in the moose suit so he can drop frozen chunks of predator-scented feces
near his research subjects in parks like Yellowstone.

I thanked Joel
for validating my online fiction with his real-life experience, and
marveled at the World Wide Web for allowing me to find this bizarre
and happy convergence.

Later, I emailed
Joel to ask whether he might send me a photo of himself in the moose
suit. He was up in Bozeman that day, but someone at his workspace sent
me this reply: "We do have images of Joel in the moose suit, but he
charges a fee of $250 per image for one time use."

With all the concerns
voiced on the editorial pages here about compensation for still images,
I'm glad that one strange ranger is clearing enough cash per image to
buy himself another moose outfit.

If he sells his
old moose suits to undercover game wardens, I hope they have the good
sense to stay off the road. I would hate for this story to come full
circle with the collision of a not-moose and a crew car.